The document summarizes the ideas of early urban planners from 1880-1945 who foresaw future urban problems and proposed solutions. The planners fell into two groups - the Anglo-American group which included Howard, Unwin, Perry, and Wright, and the Continental European group including Soria y Mata and Le Corbusier. The planners proposed ideas like garden cities, neighborhood units, linear cities, and increasing density to address issues like overcrowding, poor housing, and the separation of residential and industrial areas. While some ideas were utopian, planners generally aimed to address physical urban problems through physical planning solutions.
The document summarizes the ideas of early urban planners from 1880-1945 who foresaw future urban problems and proposed solutions. The planners fell into two groups - the Anglo-American group which included Howard, Unwin, Perry, and Wright, and the Continental European group including Soria y Mata and Le Corbusier. The planners proposed ideas like garden cities, neighborhood units, linear cities, and increasing density to address issues like overcrowding, poor housing, and the separation of residential and industrial areas. While some ideas were utopian, planners generally aimed to address physical urban problems through physical planning solutions.
The document summarizes the ideas of early urban planners from 1880-1945 who foresaw future urban problems and proposed solutions. The planners fell into two groups - the Anglo-American group which included Howard, Unwin, Perry, and Wright, and the Continental European group including Soria y Mata and Le Corbusier. The planners proposed ideas like garden cities, neighborhood units, linear cities, and increasing density to address issues like overcrowding, poor housing, and the separation of residential and industrial areas. While some ideas were utopian, planners generally aimed to address physical urban problems through physical planning solutions.
The document summarizes the ideas of early urban planners from 1880-1945 who foresaw future urban problems and proposed solutions. The planners fell into two groups - the Anglo-American group which included Howard, Unwin, Perry, and Wright, and the Continental European group including Soria y Mata and Le Corbusier. The planners proposed ideas like garden cities, neighborhood units, linear cities, and increasing density to address issues like overcrowding, poor housing, and the separation of residential and industrial areas. While some ideas were utopian, planners generally aimed to address physical urban problems through physical planning solutions.
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Group 1: The Seers
Definition:
Seer - a person who is supposed to be able, through supernatural insight, to see what the future holds
- In relation to urban planning, these are the people who foresaw future urban problems during their time (1880 to 1945), then developed ideas and solutions to these problems.
Two Groups of Thinkers
Anglo-American Group Continental European Group
• Ebenezer Howard • Soria y Mata
• Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker • Le Corbusier • Clarence Perry, Clarence Stein, and Alker Tripp • Patrick Geddes and Patrick Abercrombie • Frank Lloyd Wright
Ebenezer Howard
• The most influential of all thinkers in the Anglo-American Group
• The idea of “Garden Cities”
The idea involves decentralizing industry from the city, or at least from its inner sections. A new town will be built around the decentralized plant, thus combining working and living in a healthy environment. The strongest intellectual influence on Howard’s thinking was that of the Victorian economist Alfred Marshall. Marshall thought of the idea of “new town” as the answer to the problems of the cities. He argued that industries will travel freely and locate anywhere if labor was available. This will then result to poor health and poor housing in the community.
• Town vs Countryside Towns offer job opportunities but have poor environment. Conversely, countryside has a very good environment but lacks job opportunities.
• Town-Country – The Garden City
Combines the advantages of both the town and countryside therefore, eliminating the disadvantages. Garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate areas, of residences, industry, and agriculture.
• Greenbelts - a policy and land use designation used in land use planning to retain areas of largely undeveloped, wild, or agricultural land surrounding or neighboring urban areas.
Unwin and Parker
• They are the two architects who designed the first garden city, Letchworth, a town in England.
• Developed important modifications to Howard’s idea.
• Unwin argued that housing should be developed at lower densities. He also pointed out the need for public open space that is dependent on the number of people living in a city. • Parker then argued that the ‘background of open space’ between cities should be occupied by parkways to provide easy interconnections between them.
Perry, Stein, and Tripp
• Perry, also influenced by Howard’s idea, developed the idea of the neighborhood unit. The idea is to place local shops, schools, and other services in each town so these services will be easily available and accessible to people for their every day living. This also gives identity to the city because of the type of service it offers.
• Stein took the neighborhood concept further by segregating the pedestrian routes used for local journeys from routes used by car traffic. The vehicle streets were divided into main primary routes which then lead to local routes.
• Tripp however argued that streets which serve mixed functions and have many points of access to local streets will give rise to congestion and accidents. He suggests that main roads should be segregated from local streets with only occasional access.
Geddes and Abercrombie
• Abercrombie’s most notable contributions to Anglo-American planning theory and practice were made in extending city planning to a wider scale: the scale which embraced the city and the whole region around it in a single planning exercise.
• Geddes, more than anyone, gave planning a logical structure. He said that planning should be made based on the study of reality; that there are economic and social forces to be considered in urban planning.
Wright
• Based his thinking on a social premise: that it was desirable to preserve the sort of independent rural life of the homesteaders.
• Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home
preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale.
• With cars everywhere, there is no need to centralize activities in cities. Jobs should be dispersed.
• The idea of ‘Broadacre City’. Here, each home would be surrounded by an acre of land enough for crop growth, and homes will be connected by super highways which will give easy and fast travel by car in any direction.
Soria y mata
• Proposed to develop a Linear City
• The idea is that there will be high-speed, high-intensity transportation axis or road that will emerge from an existing city; and then residential and commercial buildings will be built on both sides of this main road.
Advantages Disadvantages
• Gives easy access to nearby open countryside • Difficult and costly to build • Growth of the city means simply adding • Although commuters’ journey may be fast, it is structures to the far end likely to be long • Operates without restrictions of green belts
Le Corbusier
4 Propositions:
1. The traditional city has become functionally obsolete due to increasing size and increasing congestion at the center. 2. The paradox that the congestion could be cured by increasing the density. The increase in population density by means of building tall skyscrapers will allow more lot or ground area to be available. This can then be used for other purposes that will ease congestion. 3. There should be equal densities all over the city. This will reduce the pressure on the central business districts. 4. Corbusier argues that this new urban form could accommodate a new and highly efficient urban transportation system, incorporating both rail lines and completely segregated elevated motorways.
Conclusion
• Most of these planners were concerned with the production of blueprints or statements of the future end-state of the city as they desired to see it. They were far less concerned on the continuous process of planning; instead they acted as omniscient rulers imposing their own visions on how the world should be.
• Howard and Geddes are exceptions to this criticism. Howard’s idea may have seemed utopian but he never avoided the practical details of how to bring his idea about. Geddes was explicitly concerned that planning should start with the world as it is and that it should try to work with the trends in the economy and society.
• These pioneers are very much physical planners. They saw urban problems in physical terms, therefore creating physical solutions.
